cover image Albany Park

Albany Park

Patrice Chaplin. Viking Books, $16.95 (191pp) ISBN 978-0-670-81243-1

In this obsessional autobiography, an English novelist portrays her destructive involvement with Jose, a Catalan she met when hitchhiking along the Costa Brava in the mid-1950s. Fleeing her mentally disturbed mother and unhappy South London childhood, the then 15-year-old Chaplin found enchantment and excitement with her poet-hotelier lover, but aside from one episode in Paris, failed to get him away from his domineering mother and his own obsession with Catalonia. Even after her marriage to Michael, a son of Charlie Chaplin, motherhood and her realization that Jose had exploited her as he did other women and men with whom he was sexually involved, she could not resist his magical charm. ""He was a gift, an extraordinary delight in a life which had been quite often drab and low on delights.'' (April 8)